00:00:24.000We talk social media tech bias and so much more.
00:00:26.000And if you haven't listened to our sister episode today, where I sit down with the president of the United States, you got to listen to it.
00:00:31.000Download it, press subscribe, email us, freedom at charliekirk.com.
00:00:51.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:00.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:12.000Welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.
00:01:16.000We have discussed at length tech bias, censorship, and the power that social media companies have over the discussion happening in America, political speech, and quite honestly, how digital and social media companies can almost digitally assassinate people.
00:01:38.000They have a massive amount of authority over what people think and how they communicate.
00:01:46.000You heard me talk previously about a friend of mine, Alex LaRusso, who works at Turning Point USA in a variety of different ways, who was very active on Twitter, retweeted by the President of the United States multiple times, grew his Twitter to over 100,000 followers.
00:02:04.000And then one day, his Twitter just got deleted, disappeared.
00:02:08.000And I'm honored to have Alex, who's also known as ALX formerly on Twitter, here with us today.
00:02:35.000Okay, so it was right after a tweet by Joe Biden's campaign.
00:02:43.000They sent out a tweet saying, make your own avatar in support of Vice President Biden.
00:02:51.000So being the internet troll that I am at sometimes, I thought it would be funny to make a meme out of that where I put President Xi of China in for where you were supposed to put yourself saying I support Vice President Biden.
00:03:10.000So I put that in and about 10 minutes later, I received a notification saying that my account has been suspended from Twitter.
00:03:20.000And so they didn't email me or give me any specific reason.
00:03:25.000They just told me that I was suspended with no other reason.
00:03:29.000So initially, I thought it was that meme that I posted, and that's what everyone else assumed.
00:03:36.000They also said that that was the reason.
00:03:40.000So we tried to communicate with Twitter and we tried to appeal the suspension, tried to find out what was going on.
00:03:47.000And it turns out that they had suspended me because I had an account suspended in the past.
00:03:53.000So I had an account suspended in the past about two years ago.
00:03:58.000And they never really gave any background on it.
00:04:02.000So the account that I was using at ALX, that was just not affected by the suspension, like the initial suspension that I had two years ago, which frankly I kind of slipped my mind.
00:04:15.000So I was continuing to use that account.
00:04:17.000I was retweeted by the president, like you mentioned, about seven times, and I was growing exponentially.
00:04:24.000And for them to go back and find something from two years ago where they gave me no background and say that we're going to take you off Twitter because of this, mind you, they normally give a warning.
00:04:40.000I went back and they actually said that I was suspended initially for having, what they say, multiple accounts for malicious purposes.
00:04:50.000So I looked into that violation and they didn't really give any specifics about what that meant.
00:04:56.000I did have a couple of accounts, but for example, I made an account to help my small business that I worked at two years ago.
00:05:09.000So I wouldn't call that malicious, maybe to vegans, but I don't think that's malicious at all.
00:05:16.000I also had a Twitter account when I was in high school where it was a Spanish Twitter account where I'd get extra credit for tweeting in Spanish.
00:05:24.000So that was another account that I had.
00:05:26.000I don't consider any of these to be malicious purposes.
00:05:30.000So for them to take every account that I had down in the past except for a few, like the other one at ALX, which I just continued to use, is frankly, it's kind of disturbing how they can just go back.
00:06:44.000So you're creating the content on their platform, which they claim to be.
00:06:48.000So technically, I would think that that would be your intellectual property, your thoughts, your work, everything going into that.
00:06:55.000So for them to just take it away without any sort of specific explanation or even warning at all, like, it is immoral because it's taking away a piece of you.
00:07:21.000I mean, it's something that meant something to you that was useful to you, that was part of your identity.
00:07:26.000And especially in these times where, like, I'm in an industry where viral politics, it's very, very useful and almost impossible to not have a Twitter account in these times.
00:07:38.000The President of the United States uses Twitter a lot.
00:07:42.000How am I going to have my work seen by the President of the United States?
00:08:12.000I've spent probably tens of thousands of hours on Twitter pouring into that platform, thinking about funny, insightful, wise things, you know, to be able to, hopefully wise things to say.
00:08:23.000And when I went up the food chain to try to appeal your decision, I was told you know why you were suspended.
00:08:29.000Do you know why you were suspended, ALX?
00:08:32.000And the interface that we had that they claimed was when you appeal a Twitter suspension, you fill out a form, and then they send you back an automated email.
00:08:42.000The automated email essentially read like, again, an automated email, like they didn't even read my appeal.
00:08:49.000So they just said, sorry, you violated our terms and your account will not be reinstated.
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00:10:06.000The President of the United States, if he was not the President of the United States, he would have had already multiple strikes against his account.
00:10:16.000So yesterday, they were talking about how the Chaz protesters were basically, that trend was migrating to Washington, D.C.
00:10:27.000And they were saying, oh, we want to take our own autonomous zone into D.C.
00:10:30.000So the president said, if they do that, they will be met with force.
00:10:34.000Twitter says that violated their rules.
00:10:36.000The president of the United States is telling protesters, as the media is calling them, that they cannot establish their own police-free, law-free zone within the nation's capital.
00:11:07.000So initially, they thought it was the meme of the two toddlers that went viral last week that the president also tweeted that they labeled manipulated media because he was making a point where CNN and other mainstream media outlets cover a narrative inaccurately and try and purvey their own message when that's not what actually happened.
00:11:31.000So he had the CNN Chiron, obviously Photoshopped.
00:11:35.000It had the watermark of Carpe Donkum's account right there.
00:12:01.000So it's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
00:12:04.000And that's when if somebody makes a claim that they have their property in a video, that they'll take it down because that's a violation of Twitter's rules.
00:12:14.000So I guess normally what happens is you just say, okay, you agree to read their terms and say, okay, I'll take down the tweet.
00:12:29.000So you have these authoritarian 20-something tyrants that were educated at the same universities that we fight against at Turning Point USA.
00:13:17.000And I also think it's an unfair target on his back because the people who have higher audiences, they're more likely to get a copyright violation.
00:13:27.000So say someone with 20 followers tweets 100 times as many copyrighted material as Carpe Dongtum does.
00:13:35.000They're not going to get their stuff taken down because the President of the United States isn't tweeting.
00:13:39.000Now, are these rules applied equally, left versus right?
00:14:29.000And so during Covington, they had so many death threats.
00:14:35.000A lot of them stayed on Twitter for hours.
00:14:37.000One of them was even reported, and then they got an email back saying, sorry, this didn't violate our terms.
00:14:43.000So these attacks ranged from encouraging school shootings to burning down the school to even having an image of a wood chipper saying MAGA hat kids going through the wood chipper screaming.
00:14:58.000So the person in charge of the area of the company that enforces these rules, Vahaya God, I think her name is, she was actually asked on Joe Rogan's podcast by Tim Poole why these tweets or why these people were still on the platform.
00:15:16.000So her excuse was that they were actioned but not in the way that Tim Poole would like them to be.
00:15:21.000AKA, they still maintained their verified status and they still got to keep their account.
00:15:27.000So what happened is one of even just one of these accounts made multiple of that threats and all together.
00:15:35.000And all Twitter did was make them delete that tweet.
00:15:38.000There was a very interesting episode on Rogan where he dove into this and I thought the answers were so lackluster, to be honest with you.
00:15:45.000Was just so corporate and so rehearsed, and the rules are so unequally applied.
00:15:52.000I mean, you see how the left is able to basically use Twitter as their own medium, as their own source of communication and their own source of camaraderie.
00:16:06.000Yeah, so she said after he asked why they weren't permanently suspended, she said it's a very rare occasion where we'll outright suspend someone without any sort of warning or any sort of ability to understand what happened.
00:16:19.000And Tim pressed her on that because he was actually targeted by Antifa.
00:16:24.000I believe he was doxxed, and he was reaching out to Twitter saying, why aren't you taking this down?
00:16:44.000So I want to make sure when someone violates our rules, they understand what happened and they are given an opportunity to know, you know, get back on the platform and change their behavior.
00:16:53.000So I would love to ask her where that was in my instance, where I wasn't given anything.
00:16:57.000You weren't giving any notification.0.97
00:17:47.000I mean, they have gone so outside the realm of normalcy recently.
00:17:52.000And Jack Dorsey, what has he been saying?
00:17:56.000So Jack Dorsey, he's been kind of quiet.
00:17:59.000CEO of Twitter, so he's been kind of quiet in a sense where he's not going on a full-out public campaign against the president or against conservatives.
00:18:12.000But when, like in certain instances, when the president's ad, one of the president's ads got taken down, that was a George Floyd memorial ad.
00:18:21.000I guess one of the pictures was the property of a photojournalist that claimed copyright.
00:18:52.000There's been death threats against other people in the administration.
00:18:57.000I remember seeing there was someone who was tweeting every time Dan Scavino, who is the social media director at the White House, every time he was tweeting, this guy would be replying.
00:19:08.000This is a Twitter employee, saying that they can't wait until they get arrested and that they were coming for the White House next and that they all deserve to be locked up and in jail, Scovino, Trump, and everyone in his administration.
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00:20:38.000I mean, the only way I could possibly explain it is imagine a world where all of a sudden the TV companies could decide that Fox News can no longer be shown.
00:20:55.000How angry would you be if all of a sudden you can't watch Tucker?
00:20:58.000Like that's the equivalent of what happens every single day on Twitter is these tech tyrants just push the button and they decide, nope, you can't do it.
00:21:07.000Now what I can understand though, Alex, is they say they're a platform, but they act like a publisher.
00:21:16.000Yeah, so they and they're also given special protections by our government under section 230 of the Communications and Decency Act.
00:21:24.000So in good faith that they're acting as a platform which they're not allowed to make editorial judgments and just take out what they don't like.
00:21:35.000They're supposed to be, that would be a publisher.
00:21:38.000So there's supposed to be a platform where people are able to talk.
00:21:41.000You gave the example of like a TV station.
00:21:44.000I'd like to say maybe even say like a telephone company.
00:21:48.000Yeah, what if they just disconnect your line if you've all of a sudden you say MAGA?
00:21:52.000So a picture for older listeners, maybe picture you're having a conversation with a friend and you just say something that the owners of the telephone company don't like and they disconnect the line permanently and they don't even tell you why.
00:22:07.000So that could be an explanation of just how jarring it is.
00:22:14.000And even further, like I explained earlier, how in my career path, it's almost necessary to have a Twitter account.
00:22:22.000So not only are you shutting down conversation, but you're like shutting down entire careers.
00:22:27.000So, and I also imagine for our older listeners, you board American Airlines and you're in seat 18A and you have the Wall Street Journal in your briefcase and you open it up and all of a sudden a flight attendant says, sir, you're going to have to leave the aircraft.
00:22:42.000We don't allow Wall Street Journal readers get out.
00:24:40.000There are conservatives that say we should do nothing.
00:24:42.000There was an individual on television the other day who said, it's a bad idea to go after the tech companies.
00:24:47.000Now, whether he's getting money or not from the tech companies, we actually found out there was an article that showed how many of these people receive money from the tech companies.
00:24:53.000And any conservative group that gets money from these tech companies, I'm very suspicious.
00:25:00.000I mean, in my book, it's like you're getting money from a power that wants to reconfigure America.
00:25:05.000So what do you think the policy approach should be here?
00:25:09.000So for anyone that says that we should do nothing and say that they're a private company, I'd like to ask them what they would think about a company that falsely advertises their services.
00:25:21.000Because if Twitter is advertising themselves as a public platform where they and it says this in their terms of service that they love to cite, that they do not take any content into account when they terms like bias and saying political leanings.
00:25:39.000And actually, Jack Dorsey, I believe, testified under oath that they don't take any different actions against people of political leanings.
00:25:47.000So I'd love to talk to people about what they think about false advertising.
00:26:22.000Does that sound like what you guys are advocating for?
00:26:25.000Or I don't understand why it's okay in this instance, but it wouldn't be okay in that instance.
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00:27:44.000Well, and so what's interesting is that there is a broad agreement outside of the absolute free market fundamentalists who say, oh, yeah, deceptive trade practices will sort themselves out through regulation.
00:27:56.000And look, I do believe regulation is a wonderful comp I think competition is a great regulation.
00:28:02.000Competition is generally a really good regulation that when you have people competing against each other, you're going to have better products.
00:28:17.000However, when you have people, and this is where I differentiate with just absolute fundamentalist libertarians, so I think that there are companies that, and individuals, that do seek to deceive, and that there is a role to make sure they don't seek to deceive.
00:28:35.000And people say, oh, buyer beware and all that.
00:28:39.000Maybe you lose me at that a little bit, right?
00:28:42.000But whether or not you lose it, those laws are on the books.
00:28:44.000So whether or not you believe that or not, that exists.
00:28:48.000So if we're concerned, like Elizabeth Warren and all these people, they set up the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau under Barack Obama to go after companies that were doing huge robocalls and going after seniors, right?
00:29:02.000They were predatory in nature, payday lending or whatever it is, right?
00:29:06.000And they said, this is the worst thing ever.
00:29:31.000And even when people say that, oh, you agreed to their terms of service, well, actually, when I signed up for Twitter, it was about like 10 years ago.
00:29:38.000So their terms of service have changed quite a bit.
00:29:41.000And I know each time they update them, they send the email where they said, we changed our terms of service or whatever.
00:29:49.000And this has been over the period of 10 years.
00:29:53.000So yes, I do think they've been deceptive, especially when we have so many instances of this.
00:30:00.000So I think they should, which President Trump is already doing, and I think it should go into legislation.
00:30:08.000Looking more into their Section 230 immunity.
00:30:13.000Because if they're not acting like the platform that they were given that immunity to be, and they call themselves a platform, but they behave like a publisher.
00:30:24.000So how can they possibly be a platform if they're funding shows?
00:31:00.000So the government gave them this sweetheart deal, basically, in good faith, because the internet is a big place.
00:31:11.000The reason it was given is because they can't remove every piece of illegal content.
00:31:16.000And that kind of gave them a crutch in the sense where now they're sending all of their people who look into this stuff and say we're going to take this content down.
00:31:26.000Since they're not going to be held accountable for leaving up the illegal content, that means they're shifting their attention to the content that they want to remove.
00:31:35.000And they'll maybe remove the illegal content when enough public pressure gets to it.
00:31:42.000But to take the counter argument, Alex, is that people would say, you get rid of 230.
00:31:47.000These tech companies will be basically inoperable.
00:31:50.000That it'll lose its competitive advantage.
00:34:01.000Fly to Washington, D.C. when I'm supposed to be a stay-at-home order and hold the sign in front of the Capitol building at this point.
00:34:08.000Yeah, so the First Amendment guarantees the protection of your right to petition your government to be able to, without any rights or redresses, to be able to go and gain support for your own purposes.
00:34:24.000Do you think that it is a suppression of First Amendment rights if you're not able to do that where the conversation is happening?
00:37:09.000Google also, I mean, Google could topple a government if they want to.
00:37:13.000I mean, Google could say, believe this, don't believe that.
00:37:16.000And I think we're actually experiencing something that's quasi-hypnotic.
00:37:21.000Because when I go to YouTube, when I open up my Gmail or whatever, and yes, I still do use Gmail too much, not because it's free, because if you think it's free, you're actually the product, not the consumer.
00:37:57.000The power the government has is to ruin you financially, ruin you criminally, and all that.
00:38:02.000But I will say this: if you are accused of the worst possible thing in the world, still in our system, you do get a jury of your peers in representation.
00:39:27.000And even further, I remember during the coronavirus when it first started happening, how the WHO was not too reliable.
00:39:37.000So I do remember YouTube when they updated their terms of service saying that they're going to start taking down any videos that aren't in agreement with the WHO.
00:39:49.000Which is the Wuhan Health Organization.
00:39:52.000Yeah, precisely, because I mean, they've been back and forth.
00:39:56.000So they came out very early on and they said that the coronavirus was not contagious and that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission, according to China.
00:40:08.000So at that time, if I published a video on YouTube and say even one of the Chinese doctors who turned out to be whistleblowers and were disappeared by the Chinese government.
00:40:20.000So if I, I, an American, had some sort of intelligence stating that it was contagious and I put that on YouTube, would YouTube take that down if they had that rule in place at the time?
00:40:34.000They took down the video of the two doctors from Bakersfield, the Reverend, California, that were just telling the truth.
00:40:40.000Nine million views like that, and they just take it down.
00:41:00.000And especially going forward, because you have to think all of these tech CEOs are operating in a world where they didn't grow up online.
00:41:08.000So Jack Dorsey, I could ask Jack Dorsey what he did when he was in college or high school.
00:41:14.000He probably did some stuff he regrets.
00:41:16.000Now, if I told him that he did something wrong when he was 20 or what other people said he was wrong, and then I asked him, okay, would you love to be permanently, your opportunities in the future permanently taken away because of that?
00:41:32.000So you have to think in this sense, everyone's growing up online.
00:41:38.000So like I said, I signed up for Twitter like 10 years ago.
00:41:41.000I've spent like 10 years of my life on that platform, whereas Jack Dorsey just kind of created it.
00:41:46.000And he, I think, joined when he was, what, 30-something, whenever he started the company.
00:41:52.000So they're not in the right mindset to be taking action against people, a whole generation that's growing up online.
00:42:00.000They're interacting with their peers online.
00:42:03.000Alex, in the couple minutes we have remaining, I'm afraid that the digital manipulation is so severe right now.
00:42:11.000And we're doing an amazing job at Turning Point to try to educate people and enlighten them.
00:42:16.000But when we're dealing with Snapchat, Instagram, and YouTube, half of the YouTube homepage, which, by the way, they're losing tens of millions of dollars in revenue from this because those are, unless someone's financing it, those are insanely expensive.
00:43:00.000Cotton has just been taking real tough fights.
00:43:02.000But most Republicans, just so people listening to this podcast understand, most Republicans are financed by the tech companies.
00:43:09.000They take money from Facebook, they take money from Google, or they take money from lobbyists who represent them.
00:43:13.000So if you think just because you're supporting Republicans that you're going to get reform here, you're wrong.
00:43:18.000In fact, a lot of the Republicans hide behind the tech company-financed think tanks and like, oh, well, we can't do anything because we're free market people.
00:44:22.000It's not like, oh, we're really worried about that government tyranny, but not the other government tyranny, not the other type of tyranny.
00:44:48.000Yeah, and like I said earlier, maybe legislation in the future would not necessarily be the answer if it dismantled them completely to the point where they couldn't operate, and which, again, is why they have to keep their end of the bargain.
00:45:07.000If they want to continue to operate in this country, they need to keep their end of the bargain and allow themselves to keep platforms.
00:45:14.000And just imagine, imagine for a second one of these tech companies was owned, operated, and staffed by conservatives.
00:45:22.000And we were just kicking leftists off the platform, which we wouldn't do because we're decent people.
00:45:27.000Do you think that would be tolerated for a second by the media?
00:45:34.000If someone who supported Black Lives Matter or any other organization had any sort of ban or censorship, there would be a trending hashtag immediately and it would be reversed.
00:45:49.000And the tech company would actually probably come up with an apology and they'd probably verify them instantly, actually.
00:45:57.000Well, so that's what I think it comes down to is that you're a victim of tyranny.
00:46:21.000However, you are a legitimate victim in this sense.
00:46:23.000And by a completely autocratic, tyrannical force.
00:46:30.000The fundamentalists in the Republican Party don't actually believe their free market fundamentalism.
00:46:34.000They just use that as an excuse because they get money.
00:46:37.000They're financed by big tech companies.
00:46:39.000And I just ask the question for everyone listening to this.
00:46:44.000First of all, if you think it's not coming for you, you're wrong.
00:46:46.000I want everyone listening to this to email me, freedom at charlieclirk.com, your instances of when you get biased and censored and you guys get deplatformed.
00:46:54.000The emails we've got are unbelievable, by the way.
00:47:58.000Whereas this is just this amorphous thing, and you're shopping in the 7-Eleven, and they handcuff you and kick you out, and you're never allowed back in.
00:49:04.000And they're only hiring more diabolical, committed Marxists.
00:49:08.000And the federal government, if there was an actual power struggle between the federal government and these tech companies, the federal government would lose.
00:49:17.000The only thing the federal government has is a standing army.
00:49:20.000But Google and Twitter and Facebook could completely mass propagandize people to believe something that is so untrue.
00:49:27.000Federal government doesn't have that power.